


The nights go by so fast (still I see your silhouette on the back of my eyelids)

by TimesBeingWhatTheyAre



Category: Altered Carbon (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, light h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 00:48:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28501743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TimesBeingWhatTheyAre/pseuds/TimesBeingWhatTheyAre
Summary: “Stop looking at me like I’m a hero,” she had said.Takeshi remembers that she was angry, at herself and him and the world. She was angry enough to carry a revolution, and all the more beautiful for it.“I can’t stop looking at you,” he’d responded, and that had always been true as well.
Relationships: Quellcrist Falconer | Nadia Makita/Takeshi Kovacs
Kudos: 7





	The nights go by so fast (still I see your silhouette on the back of my eyelids)

On his first night, he doesn’t sleep.

Not in this new world, with its unfamiliar skyline and familiar violence. No, instead he goes out into the dingy streets and gets high.

He’s not sure if that was his intention when he first goes out, but neither does he say no when the guy offers him a taste of the world he’s left behind. He takes it all, even the bag.

The first night almost ends the way he thought it was always going to end. Gun in his hand, no one by his side. He looks out at a city of bright lights, and knows that not one of them shines on him.

A decision. And he chooses to live.

The second night, he occupies himself with the case. It’s not hard; it spirals rapidly from his control into a beast that has almost killed him several times already (but that’s never bothered him). He’s used to the adrenaline rush from a lifetime of violence- CTAC burnt it into him, branded angry red into his soul until he can’t help but revel in it and even then?

Even then Quell found something to love.

Well, something redeemable at the very least.

In the middle of the night, he can’t help but remember her and her face, illuminated down by the river.

 _“Stop looking at me like I’m a hero,”_ she had said.

Takeshi remembers that she was angry, at herself and him and the world. She was angry enough to carry a revolution, and all the more beautiful for it.

 _“I can’t stop looking at you,”_ he’d responded, and that had always been true as well.

It hasn’t been all that long (well, not for him) and yet somehow that river is a lifetime away.

He hadn’t believed in anything when they’d met. Not in himself, not in the world, not in people. That cynicism had kept him alive for more years than he could count and had never failed him all throughout the haunting missions and the harsh training.

He’d only dared to turn it aside for her.

Rei never quite understood that, or why he was willing to die for a cause barely theirs. But what she hadn’t realised until the very end was that Takeshi truly believed in the cause.

He believed in Quellcrist Falconer.

He still does.

On the third night, he mourns.

He struggles through the days, racing from one chase to the next, relying on the crack of bone to keep him focused and the electric noise of a gun charging up to fire to sharpen his gaze. The strange splatter of bullet tearing through organic matter, and the necessity to _live_.

Takeshi keeps going, and keeps going, and keeps going.

Somehow he needs the adrenaline to live (and he thinks that’s partly the fault of the body, but there’s only so much that he can lie to himself).

He’s good at compartmentalising though. He ignores anything that he doesn’t want to see, and Rei once called it naivety, and he didn’t correct her.

He wants to believe that even now, 250 years away from the woman he loves, the dream he died for, the sister he gave up 28 years of living for- even now, when they are never coming back, he wants to believe in optimism.

The glimpse of Quell’s face that he sees down at that museum isn’t enough to sustain him for however many years of life he’s meant to continue on for.

He scares a little girl there, and remembers the little girls in the stronghold, where they lived and played at the base of the Song Tree, and all the families there besides.

Gone.

The taste of the ash, clogging the back of his throat, the way it fell like snow and lingered in his hair as it drifted from the burning trees above. The dull-grey colour of it as it floated on the puddles of blood, and the way that the sheer number of particles soaks it up and hides the blood from sight.

Sometimes he comes awake gasping for air, unable to recall anything about this new world, and the heavy weight of the blanket tossed haphazardly over him feels like nothing more than another layer of ash dragging him into the ground.

He wonders if he was ever meant to live.

He wonders what Quell, the real Quell, would say about it. Oh, he can conjure up visions of her in his mind and dream of words for her to say. Maybe this is him continuing on with her cause, their cause, but it’s hard to know what the dead might say.

Funny. In a world that’s supposedly transcended death, Takeshi is finding an awful lot of dead people.

He wishes that they could have had longer. In the end, they only had that one night together, but they danced for so long to reach that moment.

In his better moments, he can recall lying under the bright sun, her warm flesh beside him and her face relaxed in sleep as it never was in waking. The sunlight reflected off of the water and lit up the world enough for him to sit there and draw spiralling trees into that little brown book she always carried. He makes a mark in her book, and hopes that it’s enough to make his mark on her life.

In the dark of night, in this new city lit up by artificial neon, covered by the clouds that separate them from the superior life forms that Quell had always known would come to exist-

Takeshi hides himself and he cries.


End file.
